The Woods, the West, and Icarus's Mother: Myth in the Contemporary American Theatre

Connotations Vo\. 5.2-3 (1995/96) The Woods, the West, and Icarus's Mother: Myth in the Contemporary American Theatre JOHN RUSSELL BROWN In the youthful days of modern Europe, a mythology inherited from the Greek and Roman empires offered a sportive freedom to the mind among pagan gods and goddesses, fabulous creatures and unnatural marvels. A resort to myth enabled writers and other artists to escape from practical problems of everyday life and from the strict patterns of thought which were imposed by religious and political authorities. The early Europeans wrote about the world which they inhabited in ways were expected and prescribed and, in another vein, indulged themselves in another world, reaching for a more personal and private satisfaction. In their fantasies, they aligned themselves with mythical persons through whom they might inhabit a lost civilization, the ruins of which could still be seen. At the end of the fifteenth century, the fresco painters who adorned the Salone dei Mesi in the Palazzo di Schifanoia in Ferrara, depicted at ground level the powerful d'Este family and the daily life of the city and the farmsteads of the Po basin. They created a series of tableaux, one for each of the various months of a year, and arranged them anticlockwise, starting on the west end of the southern wall: here they depicted the giving and taking of wealth, laboring peasants and attentive lackeys, and the rich and famous, powerful as they sat in thrones or astride great horses. The painters used a second level for the com- paratively simple, demonstrative signs of the zodiac, but reserved the topmost and most extensive level for the triumphs of pagan gods. Here they painted fantastic creatures, bridled swans and nibbling rabbits, the delights of Venus and of springtime, vistas of pellucid seas and impossible mountains, dancing, music, and timeless stillness. Here young lovers touch and arouse each other, and share half-dazed and tender _______________ ConnotationsFor debates inspired - A Journal by this for article, Critical please Debate check by the the Connotations Connotations website Society at is licensed<http://www.connotations.de/debbrown00523.htm>. under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 340 JOHN RUSSELL BROWN looks; Mars kisses Venus, their discarded clothes at the bedside; the Graces pose naked, unselfconsciously for all to see. By depicting the gods known only in pagan myth, the painters were able to show a world both intimate and sensual, and beyond reality. At the end of the sixteenth century, Shakespeare and his fellow poets in England also used myth to allow a freedom to the mind and to express immediate sensation. This was a means of escaping the boundaries of everyday experience and of prescribed thought. They used words and not paint, and so they did not have to segregate the real from the mythological on separate levels of depiction, or tangible experience from high flights of thought, or dangerous ideas from acceptable dogma. For writers all levels were available at the same time. Shakespeare's King Richard the Second is keenly aware of the political reasons why he must descend from the top of the castle walls and yet, even in that moment, as he imagines himself feeling his way down a spiral of stone steps in some dark turret, he also sees himself as Phaethon, the sun-god, and feels the horses pulling his chariot as if they were so many restless carthorses: Down, down I come, like glist'ring Phaeton, Wanting the manage of unruly jades. (Richard Il, III.iii.178-79) What are Richard's "unruly jades," but his turbulent, irresistible, frightened thoughts, unmanageably dangerous, unprecedented, and experienced with an absolute immediacy? They come to his mind, and so to his spoken words, together with the more fantastic, dazzling, sun- god. In The Merchant of Venice, waiting to see if the good-looking Bassanio has the intelligence or instinct to choose the right casket and so win her hand in marriage, Shakespeare's helpless Portia thinks instinctively of the sacrificed virgin, Hesione, not naming the victim, but identifying her suitor as "young Alcides" and her attendants as married women with tears and harrowed faces: I stand for sacrifice; The rest aloof are the Dardanian wives, With bleared visages come forth to view The issue of th'exploit. (Merchant, III.ii.57-60) Myth in the Contemporary American Theatre 341 In the back of Portia's mind, there is the "sea-monster" which threatens to devour her, the rock on which she is chained, and the heartless sea, reaching into the distance like her own future at which she is compelled to look. She may also remember that Alcides did not rescue Hesione for love, but merely to win some horses which her father had offered as reward. It might be argued that classical allusions such as these in Shake- speare's work are the product of a little learning which decorated a moment's dialogue with a small pedantic flourish. In the earliest plays this may sometimes be true, but there the effect is not so poised as in more mature works, the words not so simple, and the effect not so passionate or sensuous. Modern scholarship can fill out the details of each individual myth, define them, trace their ancestry, and compare one "usage" with another, but this was not the way of the poets of that time. Myth offered them both freedom and immediate sensation, relaxation and adventure, a relief from bracing or restricted thought. Despite being common in Greek and Latin, the dictionaries tell us that the identifying word myth is not found in English until the eighteen- thirties. In the seventeenth century, WaIter Raleigh's History of the World (1614) has mythological, while mythology and mythologize had arrived a few years earlier (cf. OED); the classical myths were present then in many minds, but only as a general attitude of mind, not as a way of thought that could be singular and specific. Other derivatives from myth soon arrived upon the scene: mythic and mythical early on, and then mythographer and mythologic; by the nineteenth century, these were joined by mythoclast and mythomaniac. But in Shakespeare's day, myths had still not earned a word by which to make themselves known individually, one from another: they were malleable and indefinite; only occasionally precise, for a special purpose and moment, as each writer pleased. The "mythical" was anyone's territory, in which creative writers could please themselves. For the poets, myths were pluralist and fragmentary, vivid as the most intimate of experiences or fantasies, and usable in whatever way they chose. Any mythologic person or place could become a personal treasure, individually experienced, user-friendly, and neither remote nor 342 JOHN RUSSELL BROWN constrained by rules and demarcations. When Ben Jonson wanted to explain how a poet's imagination could soar to great heights and yet remain in touch with personal experience, he used a trio of myths: a poet, he wrote, has a divine instinct or rapture which contemns common and known conceptions. It utters somewhat above a mortal mouth... it gets aloft, and flies away with his rider, whither before it was doubtful to ascend. This the poets understood by their Helicon, Pegasus, or Parnassus.1 ... ... ... In early modem Europe, the myths of Greece and Rome were an amazing other world, almost out of the reach of thinkers who tried to define everything by Christian doctrine and not easily controlled by the powerful censors of art in all its forms, and especially those of the printed book and performed play. When another new world began to establish itself in North America, artists found it was less easy to use memories of the ancient, "classical" world; the necessary books and learning were not generally available, and the physical remains of that civilization were outside the bounds of most people's mental journeys. Artists had to find some other place in which their imaginations could be at ease and live with heroes and exemplars that would suit their own dissatisfactions and aspirations. They did not have to look far, because they lived in the midst of an unknowable world of huge trees in woods and forests uncropped by man; and if they did not live within sight of broad rivers, greater in size than any known from earlier days in Europe, they might well be within the sound of them or have heard their fathers and strangers speak of crossing them. Here was a world that they could people with myths of their own making, and as the settlers moved out of the woods, travelling towards the West, the strange otherness of the vast prairie and desert would serve the same need. These were kingdoms fit for imagined heroes and monsters; and they are still territories of the mind in North America. Dramatists enter such other worlds more than other writers perhaps, because they must strive all the time to give substance to their thoughts in persons and in action, rather than in words alone, Myth in the Contemporary American Theatre 343 arranged in sentences for readers: they need mythical heroes and exploits when they wish to place on stage what cannot be seen in ordinary life. The snag was-and it still is-that these other worlds of woods and wild west had very few gods or heroes associated with them, no earlier literature or portraiture, no ruins of palaces or populous cities. Writers had to invent their own mythological creatures, and these have not proved to be a strong breed, seldom lasting for more than a generation of writers except as nameless types or shadowy projections of real-life persons.

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